Wide area communication networks, such as the Internet, are enabling more users to interact with more objects remotely. Examples of such objects may include files, websites, applications, installers, or the like.
With these increased opportunities for interaction come increased risks. Some objects may be known, in the sense that the risk of interacting with them is known and relatively limited. However, other objects may be unfamiliar, and the risk of interacting with them may thus be unknown. Some unknown objects may be malicious, in the sense that they may contain some form of malware, spyware, malicious code, or the like. If users nevertheless proceed to interact with these unknown objects, the users' devices may suffer harmful side effects from malicious objects.
Whitelisting and blacklisting services have become available, as part of ongoing efforts to combat the above issues. These services may be continually updated based on comments from communities of users, based on in-house testing, or the like. However, new (possibly malicious) objects are introduced almost constantly between the first time that a new object is introduced and the time that it is cleared or blocked by a whitelisting/blacklisting service, the object is, in some sense, unknown, and users may be vulnerable to these unknown objects.